Yesterday, Father takes me aside as I’m leaving and asks me, have I noticed Mother’s…? He fails to find the words. We’re on the landing outside. The porch light gives us this comforting embrace — the night kept at bay — only a few glittering excursions of insects, like sparks or flakes in our little snow globe scenario.
I take a long moment to think of Mother saying she feels good-strong. Capable but just nicely lazy…Read more →
Friends have half-joked about their relationships being propelled forward by life’s practical circumstances: Jan’s apartment was being sold, so she finally moved in with her boyfriend; Sarah got married so that her partner would be covered by her health insurance package. But for M and I, seeing each other uncertainly, cautiously, for just a few weeks, it happened quickly. It was the season the city changed, becoming new and strange to us. Read more →
The ceiling in our bathroom caved in. It started with a crack and I took a photo of it every day with my camera in an attempt to chastise it into stagnant submission. But a delicate splinter sprinted across the ceiling and blossomed into a dark stain right above the toilet. It looked pregnant and close to bursting. A drop started from the centre of the stain and fell from ceiling into toilet bowl. We put a torn red umbrella next to the toilet. Read more →
Sir. You can on-ly put ca-na-dien monee in that machine. No sir. No foreign objects nor foreign monee in that macheen. It’s an infraction, you see. The guard’s finger runs tight under the small print. The wooden squirrels in the rafters are si-lent. The Black tourist descends the steps with an astonished stare toward the tele- scope aimed at the city skyscrapers. Read more →
Tonight, the aurora gallops across the sky like a herd of spooked reindeer. The stars are brighter than I remember them. It almost makes me forget the chill in the air. That my nose and fingers are going numb. That under my skin, the blood is starting to crystallize. I squint through the lens of my telescope to focus on the jewelled belt of Orion. In the Sami tradition, the stars are known as the three Gállábártnit brothers. Each night, they gather in the sky to hunt the Sarvvis. Read more →
Dust blows from the Sahara and travels, through the prevailing winds, to the Republic of K. White masks purchased from small pharmacies in the capital provide a layer of protection against this dust, the condensation of breath gathering inside white cotton, humidifying it to make the barrier permeable. Such imperfections of division were, in essence, what the Bibliothèque Nationale had been referencing when it claimed that the French libraries were better suited to protect the Jikji, this proof of the universal heritage of humanity that deserved the protection of French climate control technology; French library protocol; the perfectly darkened enclosures of France. Because I had an aunt who lived in the Republic of K. who undoubtedly sold such masks in her pharmacy, this patrimonial disagreement pertained not only to the still recent memories I had of O. Read more →